diacrisis

From Jeremiah:

3:6 Then the LORD said to me in the days of Josiah the king,
    "Have you seen what faithless Israel did? She went up on
    every high hill and under every green tree, and she was a
    harlot there.
3:7 "I thought, 'After she has done all these things she will
    return to Me'; but she did not return, and her treacherous
    sister Judah saw it.

Are you surprised to find God surprised? I was. No, really, read it again. There's not a lot of wiggle room in this one. God thought his people would do X, but they did Y instead. There's no single word in there we can dispute to say, "oh, well, that word 'frobniz' doesn't mean what you think it means..." These are very basic words in any language: "thought" (although that could be translated "said", doesn't matter), "after", "will return", "did not return".

There's also no loophole for "oh, well this is some human's speculation about God". No, this is God speaking: "The LORD said to me". The only recourse there is for you to believe that Jeremiah made some of it up, or misheard, or made a typo, or perhaps that we don't have an accurate translation or correct source documents. But of course, then you'd have to be a liberal, and you'd already be OK with imagining that God could have some limits. No, this one is juicy precisely because it shocks the conservative who believes in both God's complete sovereignty and the complete inerrancy of the Bible. One or the other of those has gotta give.

That conflict is a continuation of the Greek assumption that any powerful being must exercise that power fully. It just ain't so, people. God has already limited himself by making creation, using language, and making covenants. A miracle's not a miracle if God hadn't designed a "normal" from which to deviate. This just cements the idea that he further limited himself by giving us free will. Granted, the verses above refer to the actions of a group of people, not an individual. I don't think it's a huge stretch to believe the individuals each had their own will: God-given, as all things are with varying degrees of indirection, but provably not under his complete foreknowledge.

Now, when I say "surprised" I don't mean "astonished". That may or may not be true; the text isn't explicit. For a while, I assumed he was astonished, which assumed/required that he had created a universe in which he didn't know any of the future (except what he chose to do himself in that future). It is quite interesting to look at the entire body of foretelling prophecy in the OT and note what a large percentage is God saying, "I will do A", and what a small percentage is "the Perrizites will do B." But my buddy Jon set me straight, noting that God could know every possible future (the complete worldvolume in the future light cone) without knowing the worldline of every free will. There's certainly a difference in astonishment between "the contestant picked door #3" and "the contestant shrunk to 1/5 their normal size"--the former is within the possible, the latter usually isn't. I'm leaning that way, but since I didn't think of it, it must be wrong somehow.